When designing a construction project, design engineers are required to plan a layout for installing various cables, such as power lines and communication lines (e.g., Ethernet cable, fiber optics cable, telephone cable, etc). Planning a cabling layout can be a very complex and difficult task, especially for large construction projects. The design engineer's responsibilities include: defining cable routes, selecting and/or designing hardware (e.g., trays, fasteners, electrical panels), determining the number of lanes per route, and assigning cables to lanes, among many other things. The design engineer's principle objective is to plan a cabling layout that is cost effective and yet complies with customer specifications, industry standards, and government regulations.
As used herein, the term “cabling layout” refers to an overall plan for installing cables and related hardware into a building or structure. A cabling layout preferably identifies cable routes between electrical & control systems devices (e.g., equipments, motors, panels, etc.) and defines the necessary parameters for properly installing the cables. Examples of parameters include, but are not limited to: number of cables, size of cables, name of cables, voltage and amperage limits of cables, number of routing trays, size of routing trays, tray lanes per route, assignment of cables to lanes and routes, space between parallel tray lanes, fill capacity of trays, number of fasteners, and fastener types. A well-designed cabling layout will take into account customer specifications (e.g., power usage requirements, redundancy requirements, material quality requirements, etc) as well all industry and government safety standards.
Current planning processes for planning cabling layouts are time consuming. The design engineer usually begins by modeling the structure in a 3-dimensional electronic environment using a computer aided design (CAD) tool, and then determining cable routes (e.g., pathways) within the 3D environment. The design engineer or designer then manually imports cable tray models into the 3D environment along the established routes. Finally, the design engineer manually assigns each cable to a tray according to specifications, rules, and industry standards. At this point, the engineer will often encounter conflicts and rule violations, due to the interdependency of many different parameters and constraints. For example, a tray could be filled with cables beyond an acceptable fill limit. The engineer must then iteratively go through the process, changing routes, tray sizes, and other parameters, until a satisfactory cabling layout has been achieved.
In addition to being time consuming, current methods and systems for planning cabling layouts fail to account for the constantly changing nature of large construction projects. Unfortunately, a design change in one area the construction project can affect the cabling layout in a distant area of the project. For example, a design change to a network operation center will affect cable routes running from the operation center to remote offices. Therefore, a design engineer must track changes from a global perspective with a fine granular view. Ideally, processes and systems for construction projects should automatically track changes occurring to properties in a modeled environment and automatically update cabling layouts in response to the changes. Further, design processes and systems should learn from past experiences, both failures and successes, to provide improved recommendations for future projects.
Some effort has been directed toward alleviating these issues but such efforts still fall short. For example, U.S. patent application publication 2007/0038415 to Okada et al. titled “Cable Quantity Totalizing Device, Cable Quantity Totalizing Method and Cable Quantity Totalizing Program”, filed Aug. 14, 2006, describes systems and methods for determining optimum cable routes in a 3D environment. Specifically, Okada seeks to improve efficiency by minimizing the amount of data needed to determine an optimum cable route. Japanese patent abstract JP 2001177934 to Sakai et al. titled “Cable Tray Allocating Device”, filed Dec. 16, 1999, describes a computer system for allocating cable trays to a cable tray path. Although less relevant, U.S. Pat. No. 5,740,341 to Oota et al. titled “Design and Production Supporting System for Component Arrangement and Pipe Routing”, filed Apr. 4, 1994, discusses that pipes or cable trays can be routed based on end points. The above references require a cable route to be established before determining how a cabling layout should be established.
Some design tools alleviate the efforts by employing automated routing algorithms. However, such algorithms fail to take into account past experiences of laying out cable runs. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,021,968 to Ferketic titled “Graphics-Based Wire-Cable Management System” filed Nov. 20, 1989, discusses automatically routing cables between two locations in a structure. In a similar vein Japanese patent abstract JP09167173 assigned to Hitachi Plant Engineering & Construction Co Ltd. titled “Method for Designing Installation of Cable Tray”, filed Dec. 15, 1995, also describes using end-points to determine how to layout cable trays. U.S. patent application publication to Kawai et al. titled “Optimum Route Searching Apparatus, Method and Program”, filed Feb. 20, 2009, discloses methods for optimizing a cable route based on various criteria. International patent application publication WO2009158466 to Miller describes a computer program that can calculate collision-free paths of pipes in a CAD system, based on the size and dimensions of pipes. Japanese patent JP2006195544 to Hirata also describes systems and methods for designing cabling layouts.
These and all other extrinsic materials discussed herein are incorporated by reference in their entirety. Where a definition or use of a term in an incorporated reference is inconsistent or contrary to the definition of that term provided herein, the definition of that term provided herein applies and the definition of that term in the reference does not apply.
Although the above set of references advance cabling routing technologies to some degree, they also fail to address the need for incorporating previous experiences into automated cabling layout design processes. Moreover, the above references fail to provide a recommendation engine for providing recommendations on tray sizes (either standard or custom sizes), number of lanes per route, and cable assignment to lanes.
What has yet to be appreciated is automated cabling layout requirements exceed beyond merely determining a route or inserting known cable trays for the routes. Automated cabling layout design tools should manage all aspects of cabling layout including routing, modeling, assigning trays, sizing trays, and taking into account industry practices. It would be advantageous to provide a design tool that can recommend and automatically construct a model of a cabling layout within a 3D environment based on preselected end points and cable attributes. It would also be advantageous to provide a design tool that tracks changes to the 3D environment and automatically adjusts the cabling layout accordingly.
Thus, there is still a need for cabling layout systems and methods.